In his essay, Graeber revived the idea—already quite popular on platforms like Twitter—that the productivity gains of the last 50 years have not translated into any meaningful real-life benefits, such as salary increases or a reduction in hours worked. Instead, all those productivity gains have been absorbed by what I will refer to moving forward as the PMC (professional-managerial class). Graeber described this class as consisting of “private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants” who do not perform any meaningful work, and who would not be missed if they were to vanish tomorrow.

Quite convincingly, Graeber brought forward statistics proving that this PMC has more than tripled in size over the past century, and he estimated the extent of this phenomenon to be as much as 37% of all existing jobs, citing UK survey data of employees who, by their own admission, found their jobs pointless.

Graeber’s theory was spectacularly vindicated during the pandemic. The Spanish government, like almost every other government, published a list of “essential workers” that, quite intuitively, included many of the categories that Graeber, your auntie, or a 10-year-old would recognize as “meaningful”: doctors, nurses, farmers, pharmacists, truckers, garbage collectors, maintenance engineers, and so on. There were categories that, even then, caused some controversy (are hairdressers essential?), and others that Graeber would certainly have disagreed with classifying as “essential”, such as bank tellers. All in all, these categories combined represented around two-thirds of the employment pool at the time, and they excluded almost all the jobs Graeber had used as examples of bullshit jobs.

I had the utmost intellectual respect for Graeber (unfortunately, the feeling was not mutual); he was one of the most imaginative thinkers we had, and it is tragic that he left us so soon (apparently as a consequence of the COVID pandemic, if we believe his widow), but I have also come to disagree with some of his views, as I will explain below.

Don’t Let Reality Spoil a Good Story

I have read most of Graeber’s work, and I have observed a certain tendency of his: cherry-picking observations in order to fit them into narratives he cherished. This was particularly evident in his latest works, in which he tried to prove that the ideas of the Enlightenment had not originated in Europe, but rather that European thinkers had “borrowed” them from other cultures. His first attempt at demonstrating this thesis was the essay Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2019), which he published only in French during his lifetime—possibly giving us a clue that he was not entirely satisfied with his own work. In that book, Graeber argued that Ratsimilaho—a legendary Malagasy leader believed to be the son of the English pirate Thomas Tew and the mythical founder of the Zana-Malata society—was the architect of the most radical direct democracy experiment in proletarian emancipation. He further posited that the obsession 18th- and 19th-century Europeans had with pirate stories actually formed the basis upon which the freedom ideals of the Enlightenment illuminated Europe.

My wild guess is that the rather cold reception of the book made him look elsewhere for a more plausible way to defend the same thesis. He did so in his posthumous magnum opus, The Dawn of Everything (2021). Only this time, it was not pirates, but rather the indigenous populations of the Americas—and particularly the native chief Kondiaronk—who offered the most eloquent critique of their European colonizers, thereby serving as the catalysts for the Enlightenment that followed.

The storytelling Graeber wanted to advance in Bullshit Jobs was rather one in which a right-wing populist establishment manufactured these jobs by design to keep the working class in check. He even believed he had found a “smoking gun”—a tacit admission by Barack Obama that Obamacare was intentionally designed inefficiently to bring two to three million such jobs into existence.

The Fundamental Asymmetry

My critique of Graeber’s theory is relative rather than absolute. Let us consider the facts: the weight of the US Federal Government in the economy was under 4% in 1930—the same year Keynes predicted we would all be working 15-hour weeks by the 21st century. Today, federal spending exceeds 30% of US GDP. Furthermore, local and state government expenditures have doubled over the same period, meaning total government spending relative to GDP has more than tripled over the course of the past century.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a short, satirical book in 1955 called Parkinson's Law, which he enunciated as follows:

• The number of workers within public administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Time has shown that this is not just the case for public administration. Let us look now at what I will call the BGCs, or Big Global Corporations. The share of Americans working for large companies—defined here as companies with 5,000 employees or more—was less than 10% in 1930, but rose to more than 30% by 2000, and has remained stable ever since. The larger markets created by increased connectivity in the globalization era have favored corporate consolidation and corporate champions—both for the companies themselves and for the billionaires who own substantial shares of these BGCs.

One thing that government clerks and corporate executives share is the ability to create new roles without directly bearing the cost. What I call ‘the fundamental asymmetry’ is that the incentives for hiring an employee are far greater than those for firing one. This holds true at both the government and corporate levels, causing the size of both workforces to explode over the past century and driving the rise of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC).

Brian Chesky—founder and CEO of Airbnb, a company that scaled at breakneck speed—explains in the clip below the exact mechanism by which so many of these jobs are created:

There is no need for a right-wing conspiracy to force rock musicians to become corporate lawyers. The explosion of those jobs will structurally follow the fundamental laws Parkinson originally enunciated for the British administration, combined with the fundamental asymmetry I mentioned earlier. Furthermore, every effort to undermine this almost metastatic growth will be met with fierce resistance. One only needs to look at what became of Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative: as explained in my first post, it is evident that most of us want to be patronized.

Bullshit Jobs as a Gradient: not a Binary

Another problem with Graeber’s conception of “bullshit jobs” is that he fundamentally spared his own profession. In his view, professors belonged to one of the most important professional categories favoring human flourishing.

Again, I do not think he was completely wrong, but I see bullshit jobs as a gradient ranging from “no bullshit at all” to “fundamentally bullshit,” with many intermediate layers in between, where Graeber saw only binary categories. Any job where productivity metrics are not clearly measurable is hence susceptible to a certain degree of bullshit. This more or less excludes Uber Eats delivery drivers, but it certainly does not exclude anthropology professors.

Thomas Piketty recently wrote a book in which he dared to define his own social class—to which David Graeber certainly belonged—as the “Brahmin Left.” Piketty defines this class as possessing high human capital and the educational credentials that come with it, but no significant ownership of financial capital. This group typically includes academics, researchers, journalists, and civil servants.

The (Misleading) Pilot Analogy

Many members of the Brahmin left like to conflate themselves with other high-human-capital categories, such as doctors, dentists, pilots, and architects. However, those are professions that require real, unfakable skills and are normally licensed; an impostor attempting to pass as one of these professionals would face hefty fines.

This is not true for journalists, pundits, politicians, geostrategists, and economists—along with a long list of other members of the Brahmin left who lack a clear domain of expertise. In fact, it is often difficult to determine whether an individual truly qualifies as one.

For instance, does a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research qualify as an “economist”? This very question was recently the subject of a public debate on Twitter.

Mickey Mouse Academia and Brahmana-bhojana

Let me take this one step further: it is not only that some members of this 'Brahmin left' lack any sort of real-world expertise, but that the branches of knowledge they cultivate can often be likened to what we might call 'Mickey Mouse academia' or fake scholarship. We can even stretch this critique to scholars whose credentials are otherwise unquestionable, such as Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, who recently won a Nobel Prize using 'Mickey Mouse numbers.

It is not my purpose to say that we need to cancel these branches of academia, even though Florida recently removed sociology from its public university curriculum—a loss I seriously doubt will be missed.

However, Rory Sutherland was right when he argued that while we shouldn’t hire random cranks, we also shouldn’t rely on just one type of academic. Perhaps introducing “Mickey Mouse” academia is a useful heuristic for funding original thinkers like David Graeber.

In the Hindu tradition, there is a practice called Brahmana-bhojana, which literally means “feeding a Brahmin.” On special occasions, ordinary people offer members of this higher caste a prasad—a term that signifies both a blessing and a sweet offered as an act of grace. If they can feed their Brahmins in India, we can certainly afford to feed some of ours.

“Don’t ever come between a man and his meal”

One of the surprising outcomes of the Jason Arday drama has been the outpouring of sympathy he has received after taking his own life. I suspect that this is partly pure pity, partly because, in the AI era, plagiarism is going to be dismissed as a minor offense.

The history of literature is full of well-known plagiarists, with Sade and Stendhal being just two well documented examples.

The Berne Convention, which established the set of legal principles we know today as intellectual property, was enacted as recently as 1886. Until then, the common conception was die Gedanken sind frei—”thoughts are free”—as the song that also became popular in Bern used to say.

I suspect that LLMs are going to disrupt this model, gradually softening the hard stance against plagiarists. They will no longer be considered mortal sinners deserving of ostracization, but rather venial sinners that can be accepted into the community.

Many of those who have defended Arday are, of course, not serious scientists. Instead, they are “Brahmin leftists” or Mickey Mouse academics who are more worried about being exposed themselves, potentially losing their prasads.

Conversely, the antipathy toward the man who exposed Arday seems even better deserved than the sympathy for Arday himself. He appears to be just another Mickey Mouse academic, albeit one with a rather sinister agenda.

In his stand-up special Unforgiven, comedian Dave Chappelle recalled a New York street hustler telling him, “Don’t ever come between a man and his meal,” after Chappelle tried to warn a bystander who was being sucked into a three-card monte scam.

Arday was certainly no worse than any other hustler, his only sin being that he tried to pass himself off as a Brahmin. It is just unfortunate that his hustle took him out of Durham, where he would have remained an obscure professor unworthy of attention, and that he was promoted by the Brahmin left into a Cambridge post for which he was clearly unqualified; that was a poisonous prasad.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Philip Roth wrote his novel The Human Stain in 2000. Critics lauded it as a commentary on political correctness, which was a running theme during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The book presents us a protagonist, Coleman Silk—a 71-year-old classics professor and former dean at the fictional Athena College in New England—who had resigned in disgrace two years earlier after being accused of racism. This happened after Coleman used the word “spooks” to refer to two Black students who never showed up to his class. Coleman meant the word in its literal sense (ghosts), as an old-fashioned expression, though it was misconstrued as a racial slur.

The moral condemnation of Coleman—particularly from Delphine Roux, a French-born junior faculty member who was instrumental in his downfall and used the incident to advance her own career—is compounded by his affair with Faunia Farley, a much younger woman who works as a college janitor. This relationship was inevitably reminiscent of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that tainted Clinton’s second term.

The irony of the story is absolute: unbeknownst to almost everyone, Coleman is partly Black, but has lived his life passing as Jewish. Thus, a man who spent decades escaping the social burden of race is destroyed by a false accusation of racism. [Spoiler alert] In a tragic turn of events, Coleman and his lover die when Faunia’s jealous husband, Lester, deliberately forces Coleman’s car off the road.

Jason Arday’s equally tragic ending rencently reminded me of this story, though Arday’s real-life experience feels even more bizarre and surreal than Roth’s fiction. It also illustrates how much different the public discourse has become today compared to 2000.

In 2000, it was still plausible to write a novel about a capable Black scholar passing as white or Jewish to avoid discrimination, whereas Arday has been exposed as a fake scholar by a “race realist” who wanted to show that some black people are being elevated into college campuses over the sole merit of being black, and that one only.

At a very basic level, as the culture warriors want us to see it, the story of Arday is uninteresting: he was a serial fabulist and a fraudster whose downfall was the logical consequence of his own lying. If this downfall was so dramatic, it was only because the establishment had previously elevated him to a Cambridge chair, so way out of his league. Arday and the establishment are solely responsible for his tragic ending.

Alternatively, if the above version is incompatible with your politics, you may think that Arday was the victim of a lynch mob compounded by algorithms, and that the lesson of Christ when he faced such a crowd on the verge of stoning an adulterous woman should always prevail: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

But I think it gets more interesting when we examine the multiple layers of this story with a magnifying glass, which I will do in (at least) two posts.

Erving Goffman; Stigma and The Dramaturgical Perspective

Erving Goffman is one of the most cited sociologists. I have to admit I have not read him much. Although I almost majored in sociology, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber featured more prominently in my curriculum.

Goffman was a colorful character. He majored in chemistry and worked as a film editor, developing an interest in sociology only later in life. To support his research, Goffman worked as a professional blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino. He also spent a year working as a physical education assistant in an asylum to interact with patients and staff differently than a typical researcher. He clearly was a chameleon.

His research covered topics such as how intelligence services uncovered spies or impostors in general, and the information people chose to conceal from others. This led him to write one of his best-known books, Stigma, in 1963. Arday’s case could clearly feature in that book, which explored how some people in America concealed their lack of a college education to get certain jobs. Although it is rarer, the opposite situation can also happen. Some job holders with higher education keep it a secret to avoid being marked as failures or outsiders. Goffman himself certainly had some lived experience of the latter.

Goffman distinguished three types of stigma: physical deformities, character blemishes, and tribal affiliations. While some stigmas are highly visible—such as using a wheelchair—many are concealed, such as homosexuality or alcoholism. This concealment allows individuals to pass as a “normal person” or a “normal,” a term Goffman placed in quotation marks since the modern slang “normie” did not exist in the pre-4chan era.

To manage these identities, Goffman noted that stigmatized individuals often use specific strategies; for example, a homosexual living in the closet or a light-skinned Black man using skin-bleaching cream to present as white are classic instances of passing. Conversely, some choose to embrace their condition with bravado. Goffman illustrated this with the example of a man in a wheelchair taking a girl to the dance floor—an act he described not as true dancing, but as sheer “mimicry.”

However, passing carries significant psychological risks. Goffman highlighted the deep insecurity stemming from a “spoiled identity” and the constant anxiety of being exposed by others during social interactions.

While groundbreaking at the time, many of Goffman’s examples have aged poorly. This is particularly true regarding mental disorders that interested him; Goffman could not have anticipated a future where people openly discuss and bond over these diagnoses. For instance, the academic Jason Arday openly shared that he was non-verbal until age 11 due to autism, framing him overcoming the condition as a success story rather than a secret. And passing as white was absurd in Arday’s case, even if it had never been an option: his critics argue his race drove his professional advancement. His trajectory highlights how much more liberal we are as a society ever since Goffman wrote Stigma.

It is more interesting to ask whether Arday considered himself a scholar. We cannot know for sure. Arday had college degrees, some publications, and other items that make a real academic. Yet the way he defended himself against detractors—accusing them of racism and making up bogus threats to his safety—makes us think he was really hiding his fake scholarship.

However, to what degree are all professors “fake”? Goffman’s earlier book (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, looks at that question. It views people as actors performing for an audience (family, friends, bosses) on a social stage (school, work). Certainly, professorship, as a profession, bears significant parallels to the actor's trade.

And it is easy to turn Goffman’s view into a cartoon where everyone is just an actor playing a role, or what I call the “Hollywood mindset.” People involved in show business, such as William Shakespeare in the opening quote, are more likely to hold that view. This is just an application of the “law of the instrument,” by which, for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Erving Goffman worked as a film editor, and his sister was a professional actress, which might have inclined him toward holding such a perspective. In any case, his work seems to have carried more depth than the average Hollywood celebrity’s worldview. He was rather of the opinion that even when skill matters much—as, say, in the case of a surgeon—the delivery in playing a role will matter in how credible one will look to others on the social stage, which is obviously the case.

But what are the logical consequences of pushing what I call the “Hollywood mindset” to the extreme? This will lead you into thinking that merit does not exist and that there are no real skills. Everything in life is just a make-believe type of game, whose very essence is corrupt, and in which how well connected one is to the “producers” counts for more than any talent. Besides, if any talent exists, this is often not measured by actual real-life outcomes, but by credentials or prizes that one gets awarded by peers in another type of zero-sum game. This can lead to circular corruption rings of friends awarding prizes to their friends.

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The take is good because if you believe in these things, it carries some credibility. Indeed, more than 3 out of 4 players of Brazil’s National Team identify as born-again Evangelicals, and many are teetotalers. The former player Dani Alves, who was once accused of raping a girl in a night club, was incarcerated for it, and then released for lack of evidence and who became later some sort of protestant preacher embodies better than anyone this cultural turnaround.

Brazilian players had a well-earned reputation for being invetered womanizers and wild. In Barcelona we saw many of their best, Romário, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Deco, etc. With the sole exception of Rivaldo, they were all notorious party animals who left behind them legendary stories of extravagant behaviour in restaurants and clubs: they were also the most extraordinary players we had ever seen, and 90% of them still identified as Catholics.

A friend of mine told me that it was strange that Protestantism had not made inroads into the Spanish National Team. “But you are wrong, it has”, I told him. Only that the form of Protestantism that has made inroads into the Spanish National Team is wokeism, which is in a way the less third-worldist version of Evangelism. The player that better incarnates this tendency is Borja Iglesias, that is better known for his rants defending fluid sexual orientations than by his football antics, as he only played a couple of minutes in the entire World Cup. He is now being praised as a hero by that section of football fandom because he gave a cold salute to Donald Trump, as if this was heroic:

The same player had been previously asked about what he would do in such a situation, and he had already announced that he would not deny Trump his salute, even if he felt like that, because that was not the proper venue to do so, while also half-jokingly adding that he did not want to end up in jail.

Note that I say half jokingly because the last such protocol gaffe in a World Cup Final (the women’s one) would cost the former president of the Spanish football federation his postion, a fine and a commuted jail sentence:

Ironically, Rubiales was supposed to having made it there because he was well connected in government circles (his father having been even an active member in his local Socialist Party), but he was not at all in tune with, let us call it, woke sentiment, so he had to be purged (and so be it, I won’t see that as a loss).

The Spanish National Team love affair with wokeism does not end in Borja Iglesias, not at all. The two best players of the Euro 2024 (Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams) have African ancestry, but both of them were born in Spain this century. They did not shine as much in this World Cup, as both of them were recovering from injuries, but this does not prevent left wing pundits to use them as pawns validating an open border approach to immigration.

Both players, and especially Nico Williams, are nice, family guys very close to their immediate environments, which gives plenty of room to displays of sentimentality in tune with such mentality:

Lamine Yamal’s toddler young brother has become the unofficial team’s talisman, and much beloved by the entire country:

France’s 1998 winning team, which was labeled as "Black, Blanc, Beur" (French slang for Black, White and Arab) had already been used this way, but this celebration of multiculturality was not possible in Spain before, as immigration is a relatively more recent phenomenon, which got only massive this century, and our previous winning team in the 2010 World Cup did not have any black players, as their parents would have only recently arrived to Spain (Lamine Yamal was just a toddler in 2010):

Actually, I remember that French racists were making back then the point that Spain’s 2010 team won precisely because it had not any black players, which is just smellier bullshit that the assertion that Spain won the 2024 tournement because it had black players.

Not long ago, the fashionable opinion among the Spanish intelligentsia regarding the national team would be a sheer lack of interest, or even disdain, because national symbols like the flag were still perceived as tainted by the use that Franco’s dictatorship had made of them, but now the embarrassment is gone:

Everyone wants to be associated with the winning team, even well known Catalan nationalists like FC Barcelona’s president who was present in New York City for the final:

Anyway, for these and other reasons that have little to do with the national team itself, such as our Prime Minister repeated anti-war public stances, the high priests of international wokery have also blessed our national team themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I like this group of wholesome, mostly middle-class overachievers, who as Pedri celebrate the World Cup win shooting penalties to his father, a restaurant owner whose childhood dream was to become a professional goalkeeper:

What I am sure of is that Spain was a less sentimental country not so long ago, and that such type of “soft”, clean celebrations would have been ridiculed, and considered more appropriate for children than for grown up men.

We have closed an entire full cycle, no one seems to see Spaniards as Catholic bigots anymore, because the country has fully embraced that woke secularism without any irony, quite in tune with the international sentiment, and the entire world seems to reciprocate us for this:

The Contrast With Argentina

The contrast with Argentina could hardly be starker, especially considering that Spain and Argentina are supposed to be “sister” nations...

Remember how Martínez, the Argentine goalkeeper nicknamed “el Dibu”, celebrated his win in Qatar?

I found this hilarious, but many Spaniards find it thuggish and cringe-inducing: they take football way more seriously than I do. And maybe we can’t blame them, but there is some contradicion in looking back to the Brazilian team of the late 1990s, early 2000s with nostalgia and not being aware that today’s Argentinians might be the closest we have to that team that has grown today almost to legendary proportions.

Argentinian players are the last massive lads. Their victory in this year’s semifinal was celebrated with a sign showing a political slogan, that under normal circumstances FIFA would have been banned, but the organizers of this World Cup allowed citing first amendment provisions:

After the same match, Chelsea player Enzo Fernández, popularly known as “el músico” (the Musician) said with bravado that he actually liked English people, because they cleaned his house and cooked for him, a joke that was not appreciated back in Chelsea.

Their nicknames are also more expressive than ours. They are almost mafioso-like good. The “Dibu” got his out of his resemblence to a popular cartoon called that way. Valentín Barco is “el Colo”, because he is red haired (hence “Colorado” in Spanish), while Lautaro Martínez is “el Toro” (the Bull), Ángel di Maria was “el Fideo” (the noodle), as his long, thin frame. Ours lack the same imagination: hence the captain Rodri is just short for Rodrigo, Pedri for Pedro, Zubi for Zubimendi, and so forth.

A recurrent theme in Argentina social media is that the Spaniards don’t know how to celebrate victory, contrasting the Argentinian passion with the Spanish aloofness after such a massive win:

This critique has not sit well in Spain, because it is so obvious that that the Argentinians still have in them some passion that we have lost entirely. The Argentinian fans seem way more alive than the Spanish ones, who are extremely boring and prudish next to them:

The worst expression of this passion has been the lack of sportsmanship after the final game ended, when several frustrated Argentinian players threw punches to their rivals:

I will not try to excuse their behaviour, the Argentinian players’ lack of professionalism is cringe-inducing. There is a video of Rodri, the player who received a punch into the stomach, trying to understand the Argentinian player Otamendi, who was making excuses for his colleagues’ poor behaviour as a result of some irrelevant comments that another Spanish player had made before the final suggesting that “VArgentina” had been favored by partial referees.

Rodri, who is a college educated young man, sincerely fails to grasp what the other player is telling him. Bringing social class into the picture may seem silly, as both men speaking in the video are millionaires (and so was anyone else in that pitch), but they were clearly talking past each other, even when they did this in the Spanish language. I did not play football much, but I did a little as a boy in a junior league, for a year. It was a well known fact that private school guys such as yours truly and my mates would be subjected to similar abuse when we would play out in dodgy schools, while we never reciprocated those kids when they played in ours: we did not resent them because they went to a “better” school.

The Argentinian players hence seem to fail to understand the show business dimension the whole affair this FIFA World Cup has. Same as French peasants of the first editions of the Tour de France, who threatened to lynch riders they did not like, they rather frame the game as warfare, partly a continuation of real warfare (over the Falklands), partly some imaginary class warfare, which explains both their excessive passion as well as their lack of professionalism, that seems straight out of a bygone era.

Argentina’s team has also an undeserved reputation of being racist, out of not having any black players. The idea of Argentina being a racist country became a popular trope four years ago, when Argentina won the World Cup. This is of course undeserved, as black people are less than 1% of Argentina’s population according to the census, hence it was always statistically unlikely that there would be any black player in that squad. But that same lack of diversity makes the Argentinian people sort of tone deaf to the “multi-culti” ethos that has become mainstream in most Western countries.

My thesis is that Argentina is slightly maladjusted and lives still, culturally speaking, in what Paul Skallas calls “the vulgar wave”, the media landscape of the 1990s and early 2000s that catered mostly to young male audiences in search of a quick laugh, whereas the rest of the world has moved away from that template almost 20 years ago:

There is some irony in the fact that the Spanish team is liked more by left wingers, when Spanish players are clearly the “posh guys”, and that left wingers feel they need to grant one permission to support the Argentina team, as their players shouldn’t be conflated with their governments:

War criminals supporting the Argentinian team would make such a disclaimer almost necessary, though; the geopolitical situation did not contribute to make Argentina look like the nice guys:

But let me conclude this post first with a wild guess and one more comparison, with the risk of being wrong.

First of all, our players will not chant today, during their celebration, “Gibraltar Español”, as the one who did that 2 years ago (Morata) has been purged from this team, but maybe I am wrong.

Finally, I will illustrate my point with another Argentine player, known for his working class background and leftist politics, known by his nickname “el Cuti”:

Contrary to Borja Iglesias, he was not afraid of breaking the protocol by not shaking Donald Trump’s hand; I am not implying by this that he was right and Borja Iglesias was wrong, but rather that one showed the courage to face the consequences, if any, of not shaking the US president’s hand while Borja Iglesias did not: so “el Cuti” is the “real ting”, while our guy is just the more Instagrammable version.

I am under the impression that the job market has somehow dried up ever since the euphoria that followed the immediate post-pandemic by 2021. This might be a subjective impression (I am in the computer engineering business), but I think it is also backed up by some data that is not merely anecdotal, so a course on “how to join the rat race” might be better selling these days…

Computer engineering might be walking the same path architecture walked once before, as the field gets more crowded. Seeing the above tweet reminded me of Nassim Taleb’s difference between scalable (e.g., a writer who can sell millions of books) and nonscalable occupations (e.g., a dentist that cannot sell millions of hours), yet almost no author sells millions of books, whereas most dentists sell several tens of thousands of hours, meaning writers, as a profession, are “lower alpha”.

Architecture is a licensed profession. When Antoni Gaudí graduated in 1878, he was one in a cohort of eight students, but the typical graduating class these days in the same school has more than 500 students (and there are many more schools). A degree that was a certain path to riches a century ago, slowly but surely became a crowded field in which only a few architects thrived (the Norman Foster’s of this world), while many struggled even to get jobs as drawing teachers.

Whenever I read a post denigrating the rat race, I was never quite persuaded by its selling point because for as long as I can recall my father would have been pleased to join it, and he is an architect with his own cabinet, has always been “his own boss” and is successful by the metric of comparing him to most of his promotion peers. Nevertheless, he has been all his life struggling to get clients for his practice, for more than half a century by now.

He is still working, even when he is retired on paper*. Not fully retired, nor entirely working, he does not clearly fit into a box, somehow he is organically turning off his activity, as his stamina levels are slowly waning, and his need for money is now relatively scarce: he does not have an extravagant lifestyle, his house and cabinet are paid off, and luckily my sister and I are both making a decent living. For as long as his health still enables him to do some work, he will do, as he likes his trade (his deteriorating sight might render this not possible in a few years, but that is still not yet the case).

Finding clients on a market saturated by young architects in the Barcelona of the 1990s was not an easy feat. One of the smartest tricks my father developed for getting new clients before the internet era was scouting for plots of land that could be developed but whose owners had somehow neglected them, advertise them on Barcelona’s main newspaper classified ads section, then search for potential buyers and put as a condition to connecting the buyer with the seller that his cabinet would develop any project that would happen down the line.

He had to develop that sort of muscle into just getting by, and eventually it did not work too bad for him: he would have developed hundreds of projects during those fifty years of activity, almost ~400 buildings made by his own conservative estimates, assuming an average of eight projects per year, which I was surprised to learn that would make him 10x more productive than Antoni Gaudí if we take as a yardstick the very (questionable) metric of works brought to completion.

Antoni Gaudí has only 30 to 40 finished works on the record, that is a remarkably low production for an architect, but among his works we find of course the iconic Sagrada Família. Someone like Frank Lloyd Wright, that as my father had a very long career, would have more than 500 projects on record. But my father’s own output would pale next to the one of someone like Antonio García Garrido, a Spanish architect that worked on Málaga’s Costa del Sol and who according to the Wikipedia has more than 10000 works on his record**, which could easily make him the most productive architect in history.

My father was an acquaintance of Antonio García Garrido, who passed away last year. They were both keen golfers, and had coincided on some social occasion, because my mother is from Málaga, my uncle is a civil engineer, and the company my uncle used to work for subcontracted some work to Antonio García Garrido.

Málaga did not have any architecture school until 2005, hence all architects working in that province were imports from other provinces. And if you know something about the place, you will probably know that construction in the Costa del Sol boomed there more or less during the 30 years that followed my father’s graduation in 1975 and 2005, when the local architecture school opened.

Every architect working in Málaga at the time would not become a millionaire, like Antonio García Garrido, but let us say that architects working in that environment did not need to develop any special muscle into getting clients, as those would rather line up with the first one that was available.

Examining his own professional life, my father wished he had moved to Málaga when he married my mother instead of the other way round (she moved to Barcelona), he would have hence gotten closer to Antonio García Garrido, which was feasible, and make a good living by becoming some sort of a vassal of that guy, if I may borrow from Paul Skallas’ vocabulary.

Just living off the crumbs of Antonio García Garrido for fifty years would have made my father a very wealthy man, in a similar manner that someone like Alex Karp would have gotten rich by his sheer proximity to Peter Thiel.

When my father was younger he certainly had a bigger ego than he has today, a poorer understanding of the importance of getting a good patron, and to be fair with him, it is easier guessing that in hindsight than it was when he graduated, and aspired only to become his own patron, which by all means he achieved.

Most of Us Want to Be Patronized

Data is not ambiguous: self-employment is highest where it is least chosen. If self-employment was an aspiration most of us have, you would expect that it was higher in the countries offering the most economic opportunity, yet the pattern is the exact opposite. Check the World Bank data on this particular: developing countries such as India have self-employment rates of 75%, and Chad does even better, with a 91% self-employment rate. On the other hand, the USA, which is probably the country offering the most economic opportunities and where entrepreneurs get the most glorified has a self-employment rate as low as 6%, and it only gets lower than that in even richer countries such as Qatar, where the self-employed do not even reach a mere 1%: some people might be unemployable, but either they inherited some legacy, or they are less than 1% of the workforce.

The “escaping the rat race” narrative is only compelling in such advanced economies, where almost the entire workforce is on a payroll, and everyone on a payroll knows only other people who are also on a payroll. So a lawyer trapped in a boring corporate job would be a perfect sucker for that narrative.

This is not to say that the existential dread affecting a corporate lawyer in some cubicle in Chicago does not exist, it obviously does, but for many lawyers even in middle income countries such as Morocco, who will never get that job, a lawyer getting a boring corporate job is by definition a big winner; such jobs are so scarce that becoming a barber on a 4 USD an hour income is a much more likely outcome.

Those who try to sell you a course into quitting the rat race would often point out that better being a barber than selling your life away into waged slavery. When the suffering becomes unbearable, and it may, the analogy might not be misleading, but in general the existence as a salary man is not that painful, and if it is, there is a most important difference: the salary man can change his master, while the slave can’t.

If you lived in Rome after the edict of Caracalla, odds are you would have been a free citizen anyway, and not enslaved, and you would have therefore had some rights, such as not being flogged before having been put on trial and found guilty, remember for instance Saint Paul claiming this right in Acts 22.

But as a free Roman citizen, you would have been entangled into a web of personal obligations we know as patronage. Former slaves would often become the clients of their old masters, but that was not always the case. And your patron would most likely be a person of certain influence, as corporations would not legally exist in most of Europe until the late 18th century.

The greater the status of your patron, the greatest status he would confer unto you. You can ultimately think of the Roman emperor as the patron of all patrons, or the capo di tutti capi, as per the term that was later popularized by Cosa Nostra: not even him escaped entirely the patronage web, as he would be, to some extent, obliged to those who had served him well.

Escaping the web of patronage was not hence aspirational, nor a very realistic expectation, and I reckon that most of us don’t really aspire to such a level of radical freedom even today, as this will, more often than not, translate into being some sort of an outcast. Nonetheless, some artisans, such as the previously mentioned Saint Paul, managed such a radical achievement, since according to most traditions he developed his trade as an itinerant tentmaker who resisted any patronage***.

Corporations Seen As Patrons

Although getting closer to a powerful senator and paying him lip service might be an intelligent strategy to getting good patronage even today, becoming the lackey of a powerful individual is somehow out of fashion, and it bears considerable risks (such as the powerful individual taking you down with him if he gets cancelled or dies, to name some examples), and probably only one employee out of 10 would fit today into such category.

Certainly the bulk of the workforce in today’s America is patronized not by a physical person, but by some corporation, and some patterns will repeat here into the reality of ancient Rome: having a powerful patron (e.g., a SP500 corporation) will generally confer you better compensation (around 20% higher), and hence better relative status than being patronized by a mom-and-pop store.

Only 17% of the American workforce is employed by a company in the SP500. Those companies, by the way, have on average a board of 11 members paid salaries of 300k USD or more, but that will only be a total of 6000 people, so rising that high in the corporate ladder, if you run the numbers, will be a very competitive game, somehow zero sum, and only those excelling in company politics will be able to get one of those scarce jobs.

The largest American companies by market cap are a different animal. Google (renamed as Alphabet), has more than 100k employees paid an average compensation of 280k USD, and there are several such companies in America. Becoming an employee of such a monster is the easier way to get a powerful patron, but it is not the only one.

The Mexican Welder who IPO’d

This story went viral a couple of weeks ago, as soon as SpaceX started trading:

Juan Hernández, from Coahuila, started working as a contractor for SpaceX in 2015, earning 28 USD an hour, but at some point they offered 10000 dollars in the form of stock, which he accepted, as he had never received such an option before.

He spent 10 years with them, accrued 6500 shares, today he is a millionaire. He certainly understood the importance of working for a good patron, because he now works for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company.

The point of this story is that the way you get exposure to such patrons is somehow irrelevant: there are the traditional paths, such as a STEM degree, but exposure to a good patron, even in an indirect fashion as in Juan Hernández’s case, will beat a traditional path that does not lead to any exposure to good patronage.

Getting a Good Patron Matters more than any Framework

Getting to work for a corporation like Google is far from obvious. But there are ways into getting indirect exposure that are more accessible to anyone, like in Juan Hernández’s case. Oftentimes, people care too much about the form: are freelancers superior to employees, or is it the other way round? If so, why?

I find it somehow ridiculous when folks vest too much importance in the way they derive an income, because I was at some point of my life an employee, an entrepreneur, a free-lancer, and legally unemployed. All at once.

Let me explain to you how I got there, step by step. I worked for several years as a management consultant, basically developing software for big manufacturing clients, such as Airbus. After a few years developing software for others on a payroll, I convinced myself and some other colleagues to develop some software for ourselves, so I requested a sabbatical. I had a legal right to request it for up to two years in order to create a company, but as I was still holding a right to join the management consulting firm again, I was somehow still an employee. I then created the French equivalent of an LLC, in which I had the lion’s share with my sister, and my former colleagues were minority stakeholders.

I also signed up as unemployed in what was then known as Pôle Emploi; France has one category (category 5) for the unemployed that is defined as a job seeker who is creating a company, to which I could fit in and I did so in order not to lose my health benefits. On top of this, I signed up in the French self-employed register, so that I was opportunistically free-lancing for some gigs I could find while occasionally as well for my own LLC, which was pre-revenue; I could not really draw a salary from it.

It was a beautiful moment of discovery, and I strive to get back to that square (you can read this Substack as an attempt to reach again that sweet spot), even if my LLC went bankrupt after just a couple of years. We all should be comfortable not matching any bureaucratic case, be it as employee, or as a contractor, or as an entrepreneur. Your objective should rather be blowing up Pôle Empoi’s check boxes.

That might have been my best career move in spite of the LLC bankruptcy. It is hard to do such guesses, but having had my own (failed) company gave me some odd credibility as an e-commerce expert, which helped establish me as a consultant in this field in Geneva, working mostly for some luxury watch manufacturer.

Not to mention that one of my former partners went later to create a separate LLC, in which he invited me to invest some money, in the much more promising field of medical AI, which so far looks like a winner (though it is yet to soon to call).

As per my own experience, the working conditions of the luxury industry in Europe are far more interesting than those in the manufacturing sector, which is more competitive. Maybe this is because luxury has more “fat tails” exposure, but I might write about this in subsequent posts. I only ended up there by happenstance, and by moving a lot, geographically but also especially between different work categories. Moving randomly, following a Brownian motion pattern as some foragers do until finding a bush with berries (or a good patron) is an underrated life strategy.

*My father touches a minimum pension issued by the architect’s guild, which is not incompatible with maintaining an activity. He does not fit clearly in the “retired” nor “active” category, which is in my opinion the correct way to get older.

**The development of a project detached or semi-detached houses next to a golf course might easily reach 50 units, each house being in a way copy-pasted from one another, otherwise this count is impossible according to my father.

***A less charitable reading into Paul’s letters would make Saint Paul a patron of his newly created cult, as in his letters he often asked for donations, although rarely or never for himself.